On its 150th birthday, the London Fire Department looks back on its sometimes strange history

This year marks the 150th anniversary of the London Fire Department, and as part of the celebrations, the city's firefighters turned their headquarters into a makeshift museum — displaying hundreds of artifacts from a century and a half of putting out flames. 

In its earliest days, firefighting in London, Ont., was loosely organized. For the first 50 years after the city was founded in the 1790s, it was run entirely by volunteers. Anyone who owned a home or business was required by law to have a leather bucket on hand to help put out any fires that broke out in their buildings. 

"Every home needed a bucket and every business had two buckets," said acting fire chief Kirk Loveland, who showed CBC News some of the artifacts in the LFD collection. 

"To put out a fire, everybody grabbed their bucket, ran, grabbed water and tried to put out the fire."

As the city grew, so did the scale of the fires along with it. Over the decades that followed, the city bought firefighting equipment to be kept in a central storehouse, Loveland said, which volunteer fire brigades were allowed to use to put out fires. 

However, the brigades didn't always work together. More often, he said, they worked against each other — competing for money from insurance companies.

"They would run to the fire station, grab the equipment and pull it to a fire," Loveland said. "It became a competitive business where a number of brigades formed and the first brigade to the fire collected the rewards from the insurance company."

"They were competing — a true firefighting marketplace, so to speak, and yeah, there were fist fights and firefighters duked it out to win that battle to get that fire to collect the rewards." 

Loveland said after the Great Fire of Chicago in 1871, in which 300 people died and a third of the city was reduced to ashes, cities across North America started putting together official fire departments. 

London was no different and in 1873 it established a permanent volunteer fire brigade. 

"That was the beginning of our history," Loveland said. 

In those days, Loveland said firefighters lived at the fire station and only had a few hours a week to visit their families. They also fought fires with very rudimentary safety equipment, often rushing into burning buildings without breathing apparatus, or using rags, sponges, sleeves or their hands to filter the smoky air. 

Loveland said firefighting eventually became more organized with the introduction of mobile water tanks, horses, and eventually mechanized fire engines that put out fires more efficiently and saved lives. 

Over the 150 year history of the department Loveland said,  firefighters have been on the scene at all of the city's disasters.